General Motors' Warren Transmission was a defunct factory until the Coronavirus pandemic gave it new life this spring — for the production of medical face masks.
The plant is humming, having churned out and donated more than 2.7 million masks since late March. It is now producing more than 3 million masks a month or 750,000 a week.
But the factory's long-term fate remains as nebulous now as when GM targeted it for closure in November 2018.
"Mask production (is) continuing, and there’s no projected end-date at this point in time," said GM Spokesman, David Caldwell in an email to the Free Press.
Indeed, a rotating workforce of 150 at Warren will keep making face masks likely for at least a year because that's the soonest some experts expect a vaccine for the Coronavirus to be developed.
Also, GM plans to manufacture the face masks it provides to its U.S. workforce as employees continue to return to GM's factories and offices. So far, the majority of GM's 48,000 hourly workers are back on the job, but most non-manufacturing salaried workers continue to work remotely and will likely not be back in the offices for a few months.
But at some point, the virus will recede, scaling back the demand for face masks. In the meantime, GM is reticent to define a future for Warren Transmission.
The task at hand
When pressed, GM's Caldwell said GM's production of face masks is, "slated to continue for some time to come. We’re fully focusing on the task at hand."
Likewise, the UAW leadership foresees the plant operating at least for the foreseeable future.
“We are proud of the heroes in the UAW at Warren and throughout the country who are making important lifesaving personal protective equipment,” the UAW said in a statement to the Free Press. "While we wish it weren’t so, it looks like this PPE need will continue for some time until a vaccine is found to prevent the pandemic from spreading.”
The 150-person workforce is comprised of a combination of GM employees, some of whom are UAW-represented, and contract employees, Caldwell said. The plant operates three shifts around the clock, seven days a week. Caldwell stated that many of the GM employees at Warren have volunteered in addition to their regular jobs at GM.
Caldwell said the mask-production team also has engineers on it who are experts in manufacturing processes.
"It’s important to know that it’s a rotating group — it’s not the same set of workers every day," stated Caldwell.
One of those contract workers is Margaret Henige, 21, who started at Warren on May 16. Henige is a student at the College for Creative Studies. With the semester over and her other food service job on hold due to Coronavirus, she needed work and her father, a current GM employee, told her about the jobs available at Warren.
“I’m a fourth-generation GM employee now,” Henige said. “I was hired through a contracting house, and with the contract, I can leave when I want. They said they are hiring a lot of college-age people right now.”
Henige said she loves the job and will do it at least until she resumes her studies. She works from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, making the masks. She knows the plant's history from her family ties to GM and she hopes it can run for as long as possible.
“I don’t know where it’s going to go from here,” Henige said. “But in my 8-hour shift, we’re making about 30,000 masks. A lot of the volunteers, it takes them a few hours to get the swing of it, but it feels good helping out the community.”
Engineers do double duty
Caldwell said that GM uses its vehicle manufacturing engineers to set up the plant for producing mostly surgical masks, but also face shields, N95 masks, and other types of PPE. The engineers manage the production, train workers, supervise, and monitor quality. The engineers also set up production processes at GM's vehicle assembly plants in their regular roles.
The engineers have the process "very well drilled, making it very convenient for a volunteer to step in and work with no prior training.” But because not everyone can step away from their regular GM job, the company has hired some contract workers.
As GM continues to ramp up vehicle production and call more non-manufacturing workers back to the office, Caldwell said it's unknown whether that will require hiring more contract workers to keep Warren running.
"That’s being accounted for in the system and schedule for mask production, and fairly small groups of people per shift," Caldwell said. "I don’t know for certain — but at this point. I don’t anticipate that."
Reviving dead plants
Warren's Mask production started at 3 p.m. on March 20, when GM turned the lights back on inside the 2.7-million square foot facility it shut down last August. GM brought in an initial core team to figure out how to transform the transmission plant into a face mask facility.
Warren was supposed to be dead for good. In 2018, GM said it would restructure the company by cutting some 4,000 salaried jobs and idling four U.S. plants, Warren being one of them.
Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and a Baltimore, Maryland, transmission plant were also affected by the restructuring move that GM says will save them at least $2 billion a year.
GM sold Lordstown to Lordstown Motors, a startup that is manufacturing an electric pickup truck. Detroit-Hamtramck got a reprieve during last fall's contract talks when GM said it would invest $3 billion to build all-electric trucks and SUVs.
The last Chevrolet Impala sedan rolled off the assembly line there on Feb. 27. Since March, GM has been retooling Detroit-Hamtramck with contract workers and about 70 skilled trades workers.
“They are still in here retooling,” Mike Plater, Chairman of the UAW Local 22, told the Free Press earlier this month. UAW Local 22 represents Detroit-Hamtramck workers. "There’s been no interruptions, and no one got sick."
GM's Baltimore Transmission plant remains closed.
'Be self-sufficient'
But Warren, which made six-speed transmissions, got a new life as the pandemic grew and face masks were in high demand. GM gutted the facility and cleared nearly 31,000 square feet of space to accommodate the mask production lines. Crews installed new electrical service lines to power the equipment and assembly stations.
In its early days of mask production, GM got an assist from the Detroit Red Wings in the form of disinfecting machines to help speed up production.
Now the goal is for GM to take "some of our production and provide it to our workers when restart does happen," said GM Spokesman, Monte Doran, in an early May interview. "The goal is for GM to be self-sufficient."
GM continues to increase its vehicle production and will bring white-collar workers back to the office gradually over the next few months, and those workers will all need a regular supply of face masks.
But last summer, union members had insisted the plant can one day be restarted to build more cars or parts for GM, and that hope still lingers.
"Our plant has 2.7 million square feet, so GM could put anything they want in it," said Ghana Goodwin-Dye, President of Local 909, which represents the Warren hourly workers, in a July 2019 interview. "They trained us on how to run an assembly line. They can train us to build any product they put in there."
Written by: Contact Jamie L. LaReau, Automotive Reporter, for Detroit Free Press.